alt Hacker NewsThe last time I interviewed (around 10 years ago) I was surprised when 9 of the 10 senior developers didn't know how many bits were in basic elemetary types.
(Then, shortly afterward I also tried to find a new job, realized the entire industry had changed, and was fortunate enough to decide it wasn't worth the trouble.)
Replies
How many bits are in an `int` in C? What do you mean "at least 16", that's ridiculous, nobody would write a language that leaves the number of bits in basic elementary types partially specified‽
I mean, as a senior developer, the number of bits in an "int" is "who the hell knows, because it has changed a bunch of times during my career, and that's what stdint.h is for." And let's not even talk about machines with 32-bit "char" types, which I actually had to program for once.
If the number of bits isn't actually included right in the type name, then be very sure you know what you're doing.
The senior engineer answer to "How many bits are there in an int?" is "No, stop, put that down before you put your eye out!" Which, to be fair, is the senior engineer answer to a lot of things.
On the one hand, in today's world asking how many bits is in an int is exactly as answerable as "how long is a piece of rope"
On the other, the right answer is 16 or 32. It's not the correct answer, strictly speaking, but it is the right one.
I had one tell me all ints are 16 bits, and then they said 0xffff is a 32bit number.
> 9 of the 10 senior developers didn't know how many bits were in basic elemetary types
That's likely thanks to C which goes to great pains to not specify the size of the basic types. For example, for 64 bit architectures, "long" is 32 bits on the Mac and 64 bits everywhere else.
The net result of that is I never use C "long", instead using "int" and "long long".
This mess is why D has 32 bit ints and 64 bit longs, whether it's a 32 bit machine or a 64 bit machine. The result was we haven't had porting problems with integer sizes.